A co-founder of the Pirate Bay file-sharing service who had fled from Swedish authorities was nabbed at the border between Thailand and Laos, according to local news reports Tuesday.

Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij, 36, who was convicted of assisting in copyright infringement by a Swedish court in 2009, was arrested by Thai immigration police as he tried to enter the country from neighboring Laos, officials told reporters from Reuters and the Associated Press.

Neij and three others, who collectively operated Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent website that linked to illegal copies of movies, music, digital games and other software, were sentenced to prison terms and ordered by a Swedish court to pay multi-million-dollar fines. The one-year jail sentences were later reduced to four months on appeal.

Neij was transported to Bangkok Tuesday, where he would be handed over to Swedish officials there. He was the second Pirate Bay co-founder to be arrested in Southeast Asia.

Two years ago, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was arrested in Cambodia and deported to Sweden, where he faced charges of hacking an IBM mainframe operated by Logica, now CGI, a Swedish firm that provided tax services to the government. In mid-2013 Warg was sentenced to two years in prison for that intrusion and others.

Later in the year, Warg was extradited to Denmark, where he was charged with other crimes, including hacking a Danish IT provider that stored government information such as citizens' social security numbers. On Friday, a Danish court sentenced Warg to a three-and-a-half-year prison term.

According to the news service reports, Neij had been living in Laos since 2012 and had traveled to Thailand dozens of times. He has a house on the resort island of Phukat, which is located off the southwestern coast of Thailand, officials said.

This story, "Fugitive Pirate Bay co-founder arrested in Thailand" was originally published by
Computerworld.

Join the Network World communities on Facebook and LinkedIn to comment on topics that are top of mind.